


on some unsayable carpet, lovers displayed

by nevernevergirl



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Temporary Character Death, Canon-Typical Violence, Immortal Husbands Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Semi Graphic sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:41:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25321054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nevernevergirl/pseuds/nevernevergirl
Summary: It is passion that is innate, instinctive, primal. It is passion which draws two beings together, and it is passion which first shouts before hate and love have gathered their whispers.  Nicolo thinks their passion has been cut from the same cloth.Over the centuries, Nicky considers the limitations of language.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 33
Kudos: 736





	on some unsayable carpet, lovers displayed

**Author's Note:**

> I'm so in love with this dumb action movie and every aspect of it, and I haven't been able to get the enormity of Joe's speech out of my head. I've been thinking a lot about that scene, but also all the intimacy, both verbal and non-verbal, and how well that crafted such an old relationship, and then I accidentally wrote like 2K of Nicky introspection about it because I'm also kind of obsessed with getting his POV counterpoint to Joe.
> 
> This spans from the crusades to just after the end of the movie; I've read the first volume of the comics, so if I filled in blanks in weirdly, or messed up any mythology, I apologize!

Their first shared language is violence.

Years later, Nicky would patiently explain to anyone who cared to listen and several that did not: the irony is equally obvious and wrong in its assumption of hate and love as eternal opposites. Love and hate were, for all their terrible power, perhaps too simplistic invocations for the context. After all, their hate had been taught, fostered, bloomed under the conditioning of conviction. Their love would be discovered through a slow exploration equally as religious and carefully built out of glances, of touches, of sharing breath, and space, and life, and death.

It is passion that is innate, instinctive, primal. It is passion which draws two beings together, and it is passion which first shouts before hate and love have gathered their whispers.

He thinks their passion has been cut from the same cloth. They have watched it shift shape, have felt it each way a man can over the years. But they have always existed in a realm of too-much, of all, and of more.

They have always been on the same page, even when they were reading different sentences.

When Nicolo plunges his sword into Yusuf’s side, Yusuf’s dagger sinks into Nicolo’s thigh half a breath later.

It is a slow death. Somehow, they had both understood that what they needed, what they wanted, was time.

They lay side by side in the desert, as the sand already more ancient than even they would ever be is stained with their blood. They die, slowly, in tandem. A tilt of Nicolo’s head meets a slight smirk playing on Yusuf’s lips.

The backs of their hands are touching when they die. They are still touching when they take their first breaths—Yusuf, then Nicolo, with not enough time between them to wonder.

Learning to communicate is easy as breathing, easy as dying, easier than living.

Nicolo knows, within days, while they’re still drawing swords upon one another, how to read the shift in the other man’s eyes as it ranges from rage and hate, in their first few deaths, to a sort of perverse excitement and camaraderie in the next six or seven.

After that, his eyes begin to look tired. His shoulders slump. When he takes his hand off of his weapon, it is not a surprise; his eyes had told Nicolo first.

For a while after, they spend their days walking together, finding water, substance, shelter. At dusk, into the night, they fight again, this time like a weary dance. They kill each other, just to get it over with it. When they come to, they sit side by side under the moon, taking turns keeping watch as the other dozes.

The first night they decide not to kill each other, the moon does not hang in the sky.

He knows the moment their eyes meet: this night is different. He doesn’t know who drops their weapon first, only the relief he feels, the anticipation of standing at the threshold of something new, maybe something equally dangerous and thrilling.

“Yusuf,” the man says, his voice rough, exhausted. He presses a hand over his heart; Nicolo understands without thinking.

“Nicolo,” he says, his own hand over his own chest. They mirror, for a moment, before Yusuf steps forward, closer, closer still—until they are sharing breath. He places his hand over Nicolo’s, and he nods.

“Nicolo,” he echoes. His skin is warm, rough, calloused.

He sounds and feels as if he is from Heaven itself, Nicolo thinks, more so than the stars which dimly hang from the place.

He flips his hand over, still under Yusuf’s. They rest, palm to palm, skin kissing skin.

“Yusuf,” he says.

For the first time, he sees the love of his impossibly long life smile.

They learn to speak, in each other’s languages, and then a handful of others, greedily grabbing at turns of phrase like they might run out from lack of use.

“Habibi,” Nicolo says, in the desert still. Yusuf’s smile could end wars, he thinks. “Ya hayati.”

“Ya amar,” Yusuf responds, on moonless nights like the one where they’d first breathed together deliberately.

Later, at sea, Yusuf whispers at the shell of his ear.

“Amore. Nicolo,” he says, like they mean the same thing.

In Greece, in a village outside of Karpenisi, honey dripping from his fingers, down to Josef’s parted lips, he says _αγάπη μου_ , like a prayer.

In New York, in an apartment above a speakeasy, Joe whispers _honey_ in a stuttered breath against Nicky’s throat, his lips skating across the skin there as Nicky wraps his fingers, with gentle, delicate care, around Joe’s cock. _Honey, sweetheart, my darling honey,_ Joe chants in time with the music, muffled but still audible beneath the floorboards, enveloping their own sounds in cacophonous safety. It sounds sweeter than any treat Nicky has tasted.

“Yusuf,” Nicky says, carefully, clearly, to Joe’s temple.

“Josef,” he whispers to his collarbone.

“Joe,” he declares, against his navel.

He ducks his head down further still, and then, he thinks, they are done with words.

The first time he is held by Yusuf, they move together without thought, as if drawn together like pieces searching for a whole. And still, now—they lay together, Joe curved around Nicky’s back, fitting so well it’s as if he was carved from the spot.

As if Joe was ripped from him, somewhere at the beginning of time. Any space between feels ruined with blood, and sinew, and gore.

Joe’s thighs press against his like a balm. Nicky wraps his fingers loosely along Joe’s forearm, and he knows the purest form of peace. Joe’s breath beats hot and steady against the nape of his neck, and it is relief like a bullet expelling itself from his skin.

They are one like this. They are not lovers, they simply are.

It’s strange to become used to something incomprehensible.

Joe is intense. Each and every emotion animates him in a way so lively that it seems impossible to Nicky that he has seen this man lying dead countless times over the course of the last millenia. He loves Nicky ferociously, voraciously, brightly.

He’s the fucking sun.

In the back of an armored van, surrounded by armed guards as the clouded fog in his brain wrestles with his newfound consciousness, Nicky thinks of Quyhn. He thinks of the way Nile had left the room, when they’d spoken about fearing capture. He thinks about how that was just hours ago—barely a breath for someone his age.

He looks at Joe, so close and so out of reach, and he is more terrified than he has ever been, deep in the pit of his stomach, deep in his bones.

When Joe speaks of Nicky, the ardent fervour is familiar, but there’s a desperation borne of terror that makes Nicky ache for him.

“He is all, and he is more,” he says, and the scope of _them_ becomes new once again.

The words are beautiful, sweeping, grand. He thinks that what they are is even grander, and he can see in the way Joe’s eyes water that he feels the same. Love could be grand enough, Nicky thinks, but it feels so limited in mortal hands. He’s often so settled in what they are, what they feel, that he forgets to be humbled by its vastness.

“You’re an incurable romantic,” he says, and what he means is I love you and I’m terrified and I want to touch you, with all the weight of their centuries folded in.

Joe goes soft, around his eyes, the corners of his lips, his shoulders.

When Nicky kisses him, he feels as though he’s finally captured it all.

It is easy to like Nile.

He thinks it is in the nature of whatever they are, that he has genuinely _liked_ each of them. It isn’t always a blessing; Booker’s betrayal had hurt, deep, because he liked him. Forgiveness would come because of it, he felt sure, but it would also be long.

For now, they are four, and for now, they are in Seattle. He’s taken Nile to Pike Place Market, because she’s never been. They walk down the street eating grilled cheese sandwiches from Beecher’s, making a gooey, stringy mess as they walk companionably.

“Can I ask you something?” she says, and he grins. She’s always asking him something, trying to figure out this life. They’d found her so soon, she’d come to them like a blank slate. He remembers the hunger for answers, for some sort of order and logic to follow, to sort in a way that made sense in his head. Nile is fearful and worried where she needs to be, but she doesn’t have the same kind of terror that comes with scrambling for the pieces.

It eases his heart. Maybe there’s a version of him that would be jealous, at least a bit. But after everything, after Booker, all he feels is relief.

“Si,” he murmurs, around a buttery, cheesy bite, nodding.

“What is Joe to you?” she says, bluntly, her face scrunching nearly immediately. Nicky raises his eyebrows. “I mean. I know you’re—if anyone asks, what do you call yourselves?”

Nicky chews, considering.

“Husband is technically correct,” he says, thoughtfully. “Several times over. Ten or fifteen times over. I stopped counting after the time in Barcelona, I think.”

Nile raises her eyebrows at that.

“It’s a long life. We like to try the same things in local customs,” he grins, and Nile smiles as she rolls her eyes.

“You said it’s correct,” she says, like she’s measuring the weight of the word in her mouth. “What’s _right_?”

Nicky grins widely, wiping a greasy hand against his denim-clad thigh. There’s a sort of pride that swells in his chest, watching her rewrite the world in her head, make room for new concepts and connections and understandings.

He will never argue against the tragedy and the complications of their lives, but there is a joy in the perspective of longevity, just as he believes there can be joy in the fleeting.

He thinks he takes too long to answer, because Nile is sighing as she dunks her now empty wrapper into a trash can.

“Sorry if that’s nosy. You don’t owe me answers. I think I’m just trying to wrap my head around all of this.”

“No, no,” he says, touching her elbow with the tips of his fingers in reassurance. “I’m just trying to find the words. Words, I think don’t really work for people like us.”

Nile tilts her head up at him, curiously.

“Language works because it is a set of expectations,” he explains. “No matter which one you’re speaking, it’s created with the intent to make us understand one each other. To connect. But that requires a shared understanding. There are words, for example, in Italian, that don’t have an easy English equivalent—”

“And what you’re saying gets lost in translation,” Nile says. Nicky points a finger at her, nodding.

“Exactly. And what we experience, by virtue of what we are...I haven’t found a language yet with the words that fit.”

“I’m not sure if that’s inspiring or depressing,” Nile says. “Being beyond communication like that.”

Nicky laughs, tilting his head back a little with the surprise of it.

“Probably a bit of both,” he says, conceding. “But I don’t think we’re beyond communication. We have other ways to connect.”

“Like the dreams.”

“Yes, like the dreams.” Nicky nods, and he smiles a little. “You know, I never dreamt of Joe. Not the way we’ve all dreamt of each other.”

Nile frowns.

“We killed each other, remember?” he grins. “So, we had already found each other.”

Nile pretends to gag, but she’s smiling through it. Nicky shakes his head, amused.

“If I need a word, yes, I can call him my husband,” he says. “But it’s more accurate to describe, rather than translate, I think. To say my soul could find his anywhere. It doesn’t even have to look.”

They round the corner; immediately he spots Joe, leaning casually against the window of Left Bank Books, flipping idly through a copy of Rilke. He’ll land on Lovers on the Carpet, as he has every time he’s read Rilke for the past near-century.

Nile follows his gaze and groans.

“Okay, I don’t know if you timed that, or if it actually is fate, but either way, it was corny as shit.”

“That,” Nicky says, trying to maintain a modicum of solemnity in his tone whilst grinning like an idiot, “Would also be accurate.”

**Author's Note:**

> Just fyi, I speak English and Greek, but not Italian or Arabic outside of a few phrases, so if that section's a little wonky, I'm sorry blame Google!!
> 
> title is from the poem joe's reading at the end, [The Lovers on the Carpet by Ranier Maria Rilke](https://endverse.wordpress.com/2017/09/12/the-lovers-on-the-carpet/).


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